Augmented reality UAV controller

Controlling a long-range unmanned aerial vehicle is much easier if you have an augmented reality system like [Fabien Blanc-Paques] built. On board the aircraft you’ll find a sensor suite and camera, both transmitting data back to the operator. As the title of this post indicates, the display the operator sees is augmented with this data, including altitude, speed, and a variety of super-handy information. For instance, if you get disoriented during a flight there’s an arrow that points back to home. There’s also critical information like how many milliamp-hours have been used so that you can avoid running out of juice, and GPS data that can be used to locate a downed aircraft. Check out some flight video after the break.

That setup turns rc planes from something I find mildly interesting to something I find totally badass. It’s like you’re actually flying! If you had the money to burn you could equip a couple of them with BB-gun cannons for aerial dogfights.

Interesting hardware but as already said, this is not AR, simply an on-screen display. AR systems add digital objects to the user’s field of view. This system only displays textual information, and even then, over the video feed from a remote device rather than the first person perspective of the user.

@phil
Beyond being a more pilot-like position to view the plane from, putting the camera on top means you can belly-land the plane without risking damage to the camera. These types of planes generally don’t have landing gear, and judging by the way it was sitting at the start of the video, this one is no exception.

Even if someone publishes a hack showing how to connect to the cerebral cortex and lets him…

Well, in my book displaying blocky text most certainly counts as A/R. No, it’s not as cool as using a polhemus unit to control the plane instead of an R/C transmitter, but this is well done and certainly augments reality. His brain was looking out that plane’s virtual cockpit with a HUD – from the ground.

Could it be cooler, use a power glove and burn a ton of graphics power to make something that looks like a circa 1997 virtual reality project? Sure. But why bother?

If so, any on screen display information would AR, which is not!
AR has to include real world information with virtual environment information… so where is the virtual???
GPS… No!
Distance and orientation to home… “Probably” can be AR.
Battery power, clock, date… No!

Quote from wikipedia:
“In the case of Augmented Reality, the augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. ”

@Marco –
It’s not that sad – really low end mcus can do all of this, and are very inexpensive. I don’t want to go back to trying to savagely beat video out of old-school graphics chips. Now I just include a few lines of code in my app or use any of the standard text-to-video routines for any MCU around. You can still buy Pic chips and AVRs to do video if you want… it just isn’t efficient anymore.

Don’t feel bad… I once worried because character generator ROMS had disappeared from the market.

Imagine if you put that camera in a small bubble and connected it to servos controlled by accelerometers on the head mounted display. he could look around as if he were in a cockpit, and the HUD could counter the movement on the display and stay right up front of the craft.

I am currently working on a university project, trying to build a race car. We are interested in some kind of radio link between the car and the depot, for data transmission during the race. May I ask how you managed to get sufficient range and bit rate to send video from the airplane?

I noticed that the website for this is down. Does Fabien have any intention of putting it back up? Have the powers that be decided that he’s sharing too much engineering knowledge? If anyone has a mirror of the site, I’d love to see it. Pls post here. I have the google cache sites, but the images (and thus schematics) are missing!